At the Old Bailey the prisoner pleaded that his rolled documents had been tied at one end with a black ribbon, at the other with a white. These documents had been presented to Mr. Grahame lengthwise. It had therefore been open to Mr. Grahame to grasp either one of the two ends. Instead of the innocuous white end Mr. Grahame had preferred to take the end bound by the black ribbon, thus proving that Fate demanded his immediate demise. Mr. Robinson looked upon himself as a mere instrument in the matter and quite without prejudice or guile.
Sir Augustus Prevost, the Governor of the Bank, for whom Mr. Robinson had inquired in the first instance, was of Swiss descent. A wag in the Discount Office, prominent in the last stages of the scuffle, said, wiping his brows, that the Governor’s caller was obviously a compatriot — a Robinson of the well-known Swiss family.
And Mr. Punch, next Tuesday, stated that: ‘Mr. Kenneth Grahame is wondering what is the meaning of the expression, “As safe as the Bank of England But it had been a disagreeable affair and one that its principal victim did not easily or lightly forget. And I have no doubt that high banking officialdom was, for quite a time, not a little chary about representing its chairmen at chance interviews with gentlemanly strangers. The Secretary of the London Joint Stock Bank, Mr. Edward Clodd, voices the general feeling, rather humorously:
‘Prince’s Street, E.C. 25/11/03
‘MY DEAR GRAHAME, — You will be flooded with congratulations on your happy escape but, when you can retreat to a dry spot, please take mine, offered in all sincerity and, perchance, touched with a fellow feeling. “Hodie mihi, eras tibi.” If one, outside Arcady, could have named an ideal spot, immune from risks, even were the whole world running amok, it would have been such a sanctum as yours!
‘Sincerely yours,
‘E. CLODD’
The Secretary of the Bank of England was, of course, as Mr. Clodd said, overwhelmed with the congratulations of those who, as one lady wrote, ‘were horrified to hear of his escape’. Yet no felicitations were more sincere than those of his friend the head waiter at Littlehampton where, on the ensuing Sunday, he stayed. ‘But,’ concluded the former, ‘to have missed you at that range, sir, well, ‘e ought never to be trusted with a gun in ‘is ‘and again, sir.’ And, when next Kenneth went to his barber, ‘I saw your picture in the paper the other day, sir,’ said the ‘scissor-man’. ‘What did you think of it?’ said the customer, anticipating a compliment. ‘I thought you wanted a hair-cut pretty badly, sir,’ answered the other professionally. On the next page is the Press drawing referred to, displaying the unruly lock which doubtless gave rise to the criticism.
In 1908 an intermittent and virulent form of influenza at last sent Kenneth Grahame to Harley Street. There he was told that a City and a sedentary life were undermining him. He was advised that, could he afford to do so, he should retire from the Bank of England. He determined to act upon the advice given to him. And, though the Bank’s Directorate, that he had served so well, begged him to take, for further consideration, a year’s holiday on full pay, he refused. His mind, he said, was made up and the full pay would therefore be an emolument for which no future return could be expected by the Old Lady.
So, one evening, he went home to Cookham Dene and there he stayed by Father Thames and finished The Wind in the Willows and made a fortune out of it which he did not particularly want, although it was a much smaller fortune than might have been his had he, caring for fortunes, remained in Threadneedle Street where fortunes are.
When Kenneth Grahame, in July 1932, went further still from Threadneedle Street, The Old Lady, the Bank of England’s well-known Quarterly, in a delightful memoir of her departed servant says:
‘As more than twenty-four years have passed since Mr. Grahame retired from the position of Secretary of the Bank of England, only the more senior members of the Staff will have memories of him as a Bank Official, but all who are lovers of literature will share in the general feeling of regret that so brilliant a man has passed from the world, and will be proud to recognize that Mr. Grahame has, by his writings, conferred a distinction on the institution of which he was a member comparable to that with which Charles Lamb honoured the East India House.
‘It was my privilege, when a junior in the service of the Bank, to come into personal contact with Mr. Grahame both before and after his appointment as Secretary, and I have pleasant recollections of many small kindnesses he showed to me and of the considerate manner in which he criticized my early efforts to adapt the Queen’s English to the purposes of official letters. My impression of Mr. Grahame was of a shy, reserved man, with a fine presence and charm of manner, who did not fit in with my preconceived notions of a Bank Official; but I had no idea that he was then engaged in writing the books which would gain for him a world-wide reputation, although I listened carefully to some advice he once gave me on the subject of punctuation and the construction of sentences.
‘Amongst those who have served the Bank there have not been wanting men with definite literary gifts, but it was left for the nineteenth century to produce the man who was to be both an official of the Bank and a literary artist of the first rank, and the name of Kenneth Grahame will always be held in high honour by the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street and those who serve her.’
CHAPTER VIII. THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS
IF a man is Secretary to the Bank of England he must sit for ever in the Governor’s pocket where, naturally, there is neither time nor place for literature. So the making of books by Mr. Grahame came to an end. And, for a year or so, life was lived at Durham Villas as in any other magnate’s home. There was early breakfast to be taken frock-coated among cut flowers, silver and the floating fragrance of very hot coffee. There was The Times to be crisply turned over and glanced at. There was the rolled silk umbrella and the newly brushed silk hat on the hall table. There was the striking of a match followed by the sudden morning scent of tobacco — and, cloop, the hall door closed behind the master of the house, just as though he was any clean-collared, well-dressed and upright City man who had never heard of either Henley or Harland or even of a book about children called The Golden Age. It was all very unromantic.
But Kenneth Grahame was one of the exceptional men. He was built in compartments. He was breathed on by the ‘rural Pan’ in the one and in the other — well, a man does not attain to ultimate office in the Old Lady’s service without some ability to see also, the romance of Impersonal Money. Which is a different thing entirely to personal fortune. The former is Politics and the Poetry of Power, the latter, though desirable indeed to most of us, is not lyrical. Or few of us admit that it is.
Kenneth Grahame never in his life desired personal fortune. Had he done so fortune was his for the asking either in the City or among the morocco bindings of the story-books. In the evening he left Threadneedle Street and came home, striding among the flower-beds of Kensington Gardens as good an Arcadian as Daphnis or as ‘dear divine’ Comatas himself. And at home the baby was getting a big boy. Alastair Grahame (known, to his parents and his intimates, as Mouse) was four years old and the axis round which the world, at Durham Villas, revolved. Like many other little boys he was tyrannical about a bedtime story to go to sleep on. And his father was just the one to tell it. He would, when dressed for dinner, step into the night-nursery, quietly as only a big man can and, seating himself by the cot-side, slip a long black arm about a small white-night-gowned audience and begin.
For two years the nursery classics served his indolent purpose. But now Alastair was a four-year-old and the classics, which are strictly limited, were becoming exhausted. And one May evening in 1904 the lady of the house, anxious that she and her husband should not be too late in arriving at Lancaster Gate and the dinner engagement which even now waited them, said rather impatiently to her maid, attentive in the hall with cloak and fan and gloves, ‘Where is Mr. Grahame, Louise?’
Louise, a Wiltshire woman who still, even in the shadow of the Albert Memorial, used the archaic idiom of the D
owns, replied with a sniff, ‘He’s with Master Mouse, Madam; he’s telling him some ditty or other about a Toad.’
Now ‘ditty’, when used by a Downswoman, signifies, not Song but Story. And so was The Wind in the Willows born and Louise was its herald.
But as a tale it developed slowly, for there is much to interrupt bedtime stories when the teller must compose them as he tells. He pauses groping for an idea and, while he gropes, he attempts to interest the impatient listener with the extraneous affairs of workaday. And he succeeds in the attempt and, the listener cross-examining, the storyteller loses the thread of his discourse and Inspiration forthwith flies up the chimney.
And so the Saga of the Toad dillied and dallied and indeed might have died. But the weather turned warm and it was decided that London was no place for a little boy who was not, like his parents, bound to the Bank of England. Alastair, therefore, and his governess, went to Littlehampton and at that place of broad sands and blue water his father addressed him, frequently, by post.
Alastair was at Littlehampton for seven weeks and he received fifteen letters. Four of those letters are written to ‘My darling Mouse’ and signed ‘your loving Daddy’. Subsequent to the fourth letter the vocative becomes ‘Dear Robinson’, and signature there is none, or none more intimate than a formal ‘to be continued Alastair had taken the whim that Michael Robinson was a far finer name than Alastair Grahame and his father, while falling in with the fancy, found himself (so he said) incapable of affectionate familiarity towards an entire stranger.
But, to Mouse, or to Michael Robinson, each letter contains an instalment of the Adventures of Toad. And Michael Robinson’s governess, reading, preserved the letters and, when she restored Alastair Grahame to his parents, she handed over his correspondence, and that of Michael Robinson, along with him. This is the first letter of the series, a continuation, no doubt, in holograph, of the latest bed-time romance:
‘ll Durham Villas, London,
‘10 May 1907
‘MY DARLING MOUSE, — This is a birthday letter to wish you very many happy returns of the day. I wish we could have been all together, but we shall meet again soon and then we will have treats. I have sent you two picture-books, one about Brer Rabbit, from Daddy, and one about some other animals, from Mummy. And we have sent you a boat, painted red, with mast and sails to sail in the round pond by the windmill — and Mummy has sent you a boat-hook to catch it when it comes ashore. Also Mummy has sent you some sand-toys to play in the sand with, and a card game. Have you heard about the Toad? He was never taken prisoner by brigands at all. It was all a horrid low trick of h s. He wrote that letter himself — the letter saying that a hundred pounds must be put in the hollow tree. And he got out of the window early one morning and went off to a town called Buggleton and went to the Red Lion Hotel and there he found a party that had just motored down from London and while they were having breakfast he went into the stable-yard and found their motor-car and went off in it without even saying Poop-poop! And now he has vanished and every one is looking for him, including the police. I fear he is a bad low animal.
‘Good-bye, from
‘Your loving DADDY’
From this genesis the famous fantasy grew, told in disjoint to a little boy under the trees in Kensington Gardens, when caterpillars fall, or among the tea-baskets, when Thames water gurgled under the cushioned punt that dropped downstream to Cookham through the green shadows of Quarry Woods.
For in 1906 the Grahames had gone from London, as we know, to live at Cookham Dene, where Kenneth, long years ago, had first come under the aegis of old Thames. There ‘the ditty about a Toad’ was finally finished, down to the ‘base libel on Badger and committed to foolscap in the author’s own distinct write-of-hand. It is a masterpiece of a manuscript for a hand-written one, there is hardly an alteration throughout it and never a blot at all. It is, of course, an elaboration of the letters written to Michael Robinson and ‘My darling Mouse’. And a collector of such things, turning the pages, said enviously (his mind’s eye on a day when conceivably these should come under the hammer): ‘It looks as if it had been written to sell!’
It has been seen how firmly The Golden Age and Dream Days established their author’s reputation in America. So firmly indeed was that fame established that, even after ten years’ silence, Kenneth Grahame was unforgotten and always, in the publishing seasons, editor and publisher vied (but vainly) for his further works.
Now it happened that the European representative of an American magazine, Everybody’s (Miss Constance Smedley), was in 1907 living at Bray. She had been instructed to coax Achilles from his tent at all costs, in other words to pursuade the so obdurate Kenneth to write something for her employers, he who had for ten years put his name to nothing more worthy than the correspondence of the Bank of England.
She met Mr and Mrs. Grahame and commending herself to them, I am told, by declaring herself to be related to the very Miss Smedley, who, fifteen years ago, had been governess to Harold, was invited to their house and soon became a friend of the family. Speaking from her brief, most eloquently, of Everybody’s, she was presently given the manuscript of a story called The Wind in the Reeds to do with what she would.
It must have been a proud moment, a good moment, when the successful ambassadress cabled to her principals that she was posting to them a Kenneth Grahame manuscript.
Ulysses returning home from his travels was unrecognized by all except his faithful hound. Charles Hawtrey turned down Charley’s Aunt. I could multiply similar missed opportunities tenfold, but I will be content to say that Everybody’s turned down The Wind in the Reeds. The form of the story, to those who had looked to get another Golden Age, was, of course, wildly unexpected. So one more ‘little meteorite’ came home again.
But I like to think that the Editor of Everybody’s lived to call his country house in the Adirondacks (or somewhere) ‘Toad Hall’. For when the book was published (in London by Methuen & Co and in New York by Scribner) it became, after a slow beginning, world-renowned. It is now in its fortieth edition and it continues to sell. Mr. Graham Robertson who made its frontispiece, a lovely inspiration illustrating the phrase, ‘And a River went out from Eden’ (reproduced on page 316), suggested that the book should be called, not The Wind in the Reeds (The Wind among the Reeds being the title of a collection of Mr. Yeats’s poems) but something similar. However, under the former name Messrs. Methuen advertised it and as The Wind in the Willows (the author’s own second string was Mr. Mole and His Mates) it appeared in October 1908. Mr. Graham Robertson wrote some of his suggestions thus:
‘Down Stream, With the Stream, The Lapping of the Stream, The Babble of the Stream, “By Pleasant Streams” (Blake). “By Waters Fair” (Blake), The Whispering Reeds, In the Sedges, Under the Alders, Reeds and Rushes, Reeds of the River, River Folk, The Children of Pan. That’s as far as I’ve got at present but — to be continued in our next — Yes, I had an uncomfortable certainty that I was right about Yeats.
‘And, as far as I remember, The Wind among the Reeds is one of his best collections of poems. I like some of his fairy pieces a good deal, though I wish he would get rid of his tiresome Irish love of genealogies. I never think of inquiring who a Fairy was, do you? And he insists upon supplying his or her whole family-tree whenever he mentions one.’
To-day the artist-playwright says: ‘I well remember my joyful enthusiasm when I first read the MSS. It was wonderful to be allowed to witness and even, in a tiny way, to assist at so happy a birth. There was then some talk of my providing illustrations, but time was lacking and, moreover, I mistrusted my powers, for I could not number an otter or a water-rat among my acquaintances though I had once known a mole almost intimately and had several toad friends. Yet I could not altogether forgo the honour of lending a hand, so I drew, hastily and very badly—’
And Mr. Graham Robertson goes on to depreciate the frontispiece, the title-page design, which I have mentioned.
I have lat
ely read the press notices that The Wind in the Willows received on publication. These were respectful, the author of The Golden Age was entitled to respect, but on the whole guarded. Those reviewers who had looked for another child Harold were frankly disappointed—’ A bread-and-butter Jungle Book,’ says one of the disappointed ones — absurdly enough. Another turns round and girds at Messrs. Methuen:
‘Our chief complaint is that our review copy is defiled with a mark like a dairyman’s egg-stamp. No reviewer in his senses would want to sell so nice a little book as this. All the same we cannot help thinking it a false, as it is an undoubtedly ugly, economy on the part of the publishers.’ The Times says: ‘Grown-up readers will find it monstrous and elusive, children will hope, in vain, for more fun. Beneath the allegory ordinary life is depicted more or less closely, but certainly not very amusingly or searchingly. As a contribution to natural history the work is negligible. For ourselves we lay The Wind in the Willows reverently aside and again, for the hundredth time, take up The Golden Age.’ Years later, in 1930, The Times was to make a palinode. A leader, on the decline in the price and in the modishness of moleskin, entitled ‘The Gentleman in Velvet’, mentions that the mole furnishes Hamlet with a title for his father’s ghost and goes on to say, ‘but, if moles could read, they would think William Shakespeare no great shakes compared with another English author. That other is Mr. Kenneth Grahame. There may, of course, be sparkish youngsters down below there ready to assert that moles are higher in the social scale and in intellectual attainments than Mr. Kenneth Grahame makes them out (at least they would know the modern and arbitrary distinction between “learn” and “teach”). But of the absolute molishness, of the drollness and fussiness and dearness of molehood, The Wind in the Willows is for all time the statement.’ But Richard Middleton, in Vanity Fair, winds up a two-column review thus: ‘But the book for me is notable for its intimate sympathy with Nature and for its delicate expression of emotions which I, probably in common with most people, had previously believed to be my exclusive property. When all is said the boastful, unstable Toad, the hospitable Water Rat, the shy, wise, childlike Badger, and the Mole with his pleasant habit of brave boyish impulse, are neither animals nor men, but are types of that deeper humanity which sways us all. To be wise, an allegory must admit of a wide application, and the man has read his Pilgrim’s Progress in vain who does not realize that not merely Christian but Ignorance, Talkative and Justice Hate-good himself, are crying for mastery in the hearts of us all. And if I may venture to describe as an allegory a work which critics, who ought to have known better, have dismissed as a fairy story, it is certain that The Wind in the Willows is a wise book. It is wise, moreover, with that simplicity which has its appeal to children as well as to grown-up folk. Just as young people read The Pilgrim’s Progress and Gulliver’s Travels for the story, so I fancy they will find Mr. Grahame’s book a history of exciting adventures, and value it in this aspect no less than we, who find it a storehouse of glowing prose, gracious observation, delicate fantasy, and life-like and even humorous dialogue.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 84